 Welcome, everyone, back to Nintendo Prime. We might as well call this, well, we'll get to a nostalgia point here in a moment. We have so many big stories for you today. It's so hard for me to contain my excitement. I haven't had a video this jam-packed in some time, so I don't wanna waste too much time here. I'll just remind you, we have a giveaway going on right now for a Switch OLED, a PlayStation 5, or an Xbox Series X. To enter, all you have to do is head to that gleam.io link down in the description. Oh boy, what can we say about these? We got some Pokemon Legends, Arches, Launch News. We got things about brand new Fire Emblem games, some DLC for that Pokemon game we talked about earlier. Oh, don't forget that, hey, we have an update on a massive lawsuit that Nintendo's been involved in. We got stuff on Sonic Frontiers. It's just, it's a packed show, everybody. Oh my gosh, so, for the first time in a long time, welcome back to Prime News. All right, let's get into this very first story that I'm really excited about, and that is that we have some Pokemon Legends Archeous launch sales, according to Nintendo themselves. They put this out on Twitter. What a very interesting way to announce launch sales. And it has surpassed 6.5 million. They actually put a little plus sign with it, so it's above 6.5 million sales worldwide. Now to put this in perspective, it is the second biggest launch in Nintendo Switch history. The biggest still belongs to Animal Crossing New Horizons, which sold north of 7 million during its launch, but holy crap, Zola, is this a big figure. And you consider the massive launch numbers, which we've been kind of teasing for a while, right? Top of the Amazon charts, record-breaking pre-orders. We've been talking about this for a couple of weeks. Now we have the direct data. Oh my gosh, second best-selling Switch game of all time at launch. Probably easily gonna cross 15 million in sales. No problem, you can consider this. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shiny Pearl released two months ago, and that sold almost 14 million in two months. This almost did half of that in less than a week. That is insane, and does show the massive hype surrounding a single-release Pokemon game. So yeah, we're gonna get more Pokemon Legends, Arceus-style games in the future at some point because it's way too successful for the Pokemon company to just ignore. That being said, what's really interesting here, of course, is what's gonna happen in the future. Is this game gonna be able to become one of the best-selling Pokemon game ever made? We all know that Pokemon Sword and Shield, after we just got updated sales numbers, has officially become the number two best-selling Pokemon game ever. Can it get to that? I guess we'll have to wait and see. However green this title is will be interesting, but what is notable is not only the insane launch numbers, it also has insane positive reception. Not just from fans, by the way. Fans have been obviously hyping this game up quite a bit, and many, many millions are satisfied with it. But also, did you know that it does really well on Metacritic? That 85 rating it had at launch is holding steady, which does make it one of the highest-rated Pokemon games ever released. So this is obviously really great news for the Pokemon company and game, for really great news for people like me that love Legends Arceus as it is today. So woo, I'm just super excited that one of the only Pokemon games I've really enjoyed in the last 20 years, besides spin-offs like new Pokemon Snap, is doing this well because I want more. Next up, we have a bit of a small update on stories from yesterday. So Nintendo dropped all their financials, so we had a couple videos covering pretty much everything yesterday, but one point I wanted to reiterate, because we now have further clarification on it, from Shintaro Furukawa himself, the CEO of Nintendo of Japan, which means you're the CEO of Nintendo. So what's really interesting is the acquisitions aspect. So Nintendo talked briefly about the acquisitions happening across the industry yesterday during their financial briefing, and they mentioned things like, hey, we're not really gonna get involved in it. We don't think we need to. It's not really Nintendo's way, but he did reiterate a couple things. One, Nintendo is investing $1 billion US back into their internal team. So they are trying to obviously invest in new IPs and internal, you know, just making of games. So like, it might not be this big, oh, they spent a billion dollars to buy X company. They're spending a billion dollars on themselves, which is obviously the smart play for Nintendo considering the bevy of IP they have and the massive sales they keep getting, especially during the Switch era. They are just reinvesting in themselves, which we've talked about before. Nintendo's been betting on themselves and this is just another further fact to throw onto that betting on themselves pile. They're putting a billion dollars back into their game development because they believe in what they're doing. Now, the point we wanna clarify though isn't so much how much money they're reinvesting themselves, is that they did say they won't get into acquisitions unless it's necessary. And he seemed to be really inferring that if their major partners were about to be bought, Nintendo would need to get involved. Now, when you think about Nintendo's major partners, well, most of them reside in Japan, whether it's the team at Grezzo that's been helping out a lot, like if someone tries to go buy them, Nintendo is gonna get involved. Platinum games, obviously making a lot of nice games for Nintendo, if somebody tries to buy them out, Nintendo's gonna go probably get involved. And I would say even Capcom, when you consider the massive success of over 8 million sales of Monster Hunter Rise on Switch, you could argue that Nintendo would try to get involved to prevent a Western studio from buying out Capcom or maybe even Square Enix. What you have to remember is that most of the partners that sell extremely well on Switch that Nintendo directly works with, Koei Tecmo as an example for things like Hyrule Warriors, Age of Calamity, like these studios haven't been bought out and aren't really involved in a lot of buyout rumors. So essentially what Nintendo is saying is we're not really interested in getting involved in all these buyouts. Not that they obviously won't buy some smaller studios along the way, like they do with next level games, but it's that Nintendo's only gonna get involved if it feels like something that's gonna threaten them, threaten their company and their viability. And obviously these major studios I mentioned would be the ones to pay attention to. If we find out that Microsoft's in talks with Capcom or Sony's in talks with Koei Tecmo, that is where you might see Nintendo go and hold up. You're not about to yank one of our major partners from us. Oh, you want to go after Sega and make Sonic exclusive to Sony? Yeah, we aren't really cool with that. We're gonna get involved and we might buy Sega from underneath you. So it's one of those, Nintendo's only gonna do it if they feel like they're forced to do it. Right now they don't feel threatened because most of their major partners reside in Japan and so far none of those companies have been touched. So yeah, Nintendo's sort of insulated at the moment, but we'll see how long they remain insulated. I do think that there's gonna be a waiting period before a lot more major acquisitions get announced, especially from Microsoft, because they want to make sure the ones they currently, you know, Bungie, for Sony, Activision Blizzard for Microsoft, they want to wait for those to get approved. Once they're all fully approved though, that is when the next acquisition rounds will be talked about. So we'll have to wait and see what happens, but for now, Nintendo is obviously staying out of that space until their hand is forced. However, I will note, it is kind of nice to hear from Shitoru Furukawa that he is willing to get involved if his hand is forced. The last thing you want to really hear from Nintendo is that they're just gonna let all these companies get bought and they're not gonna care. The moment it is something that massively impacts them, they ain't gonna be cool with it. So we'll see what happens, but this is a very confident Nintendo and I like it. Now this next story is a batch of rumors surrounding the Fire Enlum series. So obviously grab those tinfoil hats, throw them on, back the truck up with salt and get ready to be skeptical and hyper-responsibly. The sources on these rumors are Marco Maro over on Twitter, but also Player Essence as well, who has used some of his own independent sources on this. In fact, I will link to both Marco Maro's tweets on this and Player Essence's video. What I will say here is that, while what I'm about to say might sound skeptical, they did actually announce five Fire Enlum games on the exact same day, not too long ago, like I don't know, four, five years ago. So we can't just say the number of games here is a reason to not believe this. Right now, the rumors surrounding three games, one of them obviously at least coming in 2022, the rest may be in 2023. So the three games are one spin-off title, which we don't really know what that spin-off title is, but right now the only real spin-off title that exists for Fire Enlum is Fire Enlum Warriors that came out back in 2017 and sold over a million units, which is still a lot for a Mousseau style game, not quite Zelda numbers, but still, it's pretty far up there on the Mousseau list. So I could understand, you know, if there's going to be, plus Fire Enlum has so many characters and so many worlds it can explore, it would make sense to have another Fire Enlum Warriors game. So maybe that is something that's in the works at Koei Tecmo that would be very understandable, especially since Age of Calamity already came out a couple of years ago. So maybe that is the spin-off game. It could be something else entirely as well. It's going to be one of those we just don't know until it's announced, it's more speculation on that it's going to be a Warriors game. The other two ones, one of them is going to be a Fire Enlum Echoes style remake where they're going to take like two different Fire Enlum games and package them together into one remake. Think like Advanced Wars 1 plus 2 Reboot Camp, or maybe what might even happen later this year if they package Wind Waker and Twilight Princess HG together. Nintendo's not adverse to packaging games together and they use this as a selling point. So yeah, they could package two older games that have been remastered in a way for Switch together. It'll be interesting to see how they handle that instead of doing a duality release, which they've also done in the past. Nintendo seems to be getting away from that, however. Also, they have a third team, a bigger team supposedly than the one that worked on Fire Enlum Three Houses, working on a brand new Fire Enlum game. And while the details on this game are scarce, it is notable that they are going to be attempting several new ideas with this game. Similar to how Fire Enlum Three Houses tried new things with the school and all that. I don't know that it's gonna be obviously that kind of idea because that's not new, that's already been done, but maybe there'll be some changes to the combat, some changes to the strategy, some changes to the rock, paper, scissors nature, maybe a bunch of different new unit types, maybe a different way to handle the story. I don't really know what's going to happen. All I know is that supposedly this one's gonna be really expansive and deal with a lot of new concepts. Obviously some people obviously wanna know are the visuals gonna be up to snuff with some of the best of the best on Switch? Cause Three Houses was a little bit rough around the edges, but we'll have to wait and see on that front. All I know is the idea that there's three Fire Enlum games in development is exciting and we should hear about at least one, if not multiple of them this year. Remember we have a rumored, well, I mean, is it really rumored? It's more like a speculated February direct coming up here probably in the next week or two. So yeah, maybe we'll find out about one of them there. It would be a good time to announce that Fire Enlum games seem to always make really good summer titles. So we'll just have to wait and see. Next up on the rumor mill is actually a rumor back in October that we blatantly ignored because we were trying to be a bit careful in how we covered Pokemon Legends Arceus heading into launch. We didn't want to over height people on future promised content that it makes sense. Also a smidge of Gen 9 Pokemon news in here as well. Now you might be going, well, why are we going back to an old rumor back in 2000 at 21? In October, well, because everything else about this rumor that can be true has happened. Literally everything stated it has happened except for like one thing that got branded something else but the idea behind it is still present in Pokemon Legends Arceus. So this rumor actually originally came from Central Leaks back in October. Here it is. And as you can see everything on that list has happened in Pokemon Legends Arceus. It turned out to be true. The only things we aren't sure of of course are the things that obviously wouldn't have happened yet. Such as the DLC for the game. Now the DLC should include 158 new Pokemon according to this. And yeah, there's also other leaks out there suggesting that mega evolutions are going to be involved as well. Although Central Leaks is in the exact place where that came from. Beyond that, however, is also notable that it does mention Gen 9 is well in development in this rumor batch and should be released in 2022. Now it is a bit skeptical on that date or maybe this could be Central Leaks trying to not count their eggs before they hatch kind of things in. Hey, the info on this is a couple months old and that was a couple months old back in October. There's no official Gen 9 announced yet. No official Gen 9 release date. Possibly coming out in early 2023 could be a move as well. But yeah, Gen 9 is supposedly well in development as of last year before Pokemon Legends Arceus even came out, which isn't a shocker. Game Freak does have multiple development teams. Believe it or not, they don't have everyone work on one game at once. So yeah, that's at least what the rumors out there are saying. We're just bringing it up because now that Legends Arceus is out, it's worth paying attention to an old rumor when everything else about that rumor was true. Next up, this is an interesting one. Do you guys remember Team Executor? They were the team releasing software and hardware that can circumvent the Nintendo Switch protections and allow people to hack their switches. Obviously run pirated games as part of that but they could do other things as well and they also were profiting off of this and they created devices for Xbox and PlayStation and other companies as well. Well, Nintendo went after them massively after they got busted and the names got released to the members. And yeah, Nintendo's basically won all the lawsuits. What's interesting is now Gary Bowser who's been at the center of a lot of this already agreed to pay the US government $4.5 million in fines and did agree in a separate civil lawsuit to pay Nintendo $10 million in damages. Now, what's interesting here is not so much how much money he's paying, that's already old news but however what the US government is attempting to do right now and Nintendo's not by the way not asking the US government to do this so this is not on Nintendo. So if you think this is a little harsh Nintendo has nothing to do with this. The US government right now is seeking five years imprisonment for Gary Bowser with three years of supervised probation after he is released. Now Gary Bowser's lawyers are arguing of course that this is way too harsh and that he only made $320,000 over the course of seven years at Team Executor and that other members of Team Executor made more money than he did and were more integral AKA Gary Bowser was not the brainchild and the person running Team Executor at least that's what the lawyers are arguing and obviously the other members of Team Executor their lawsuits are not quite as far along at this point. The US government's response is hey, we need to be really harsh here we haven't had many of these cases come across our desk and we need to make an example so not only do people get these impossible to pay fines but they actually serve real prison time that way it will deter other people from trying to circumvent copyright protections and all the stuff, all the laws are broken. They want to make sure that people think twice about doing this in the future and that's why they want to come down hard that's the government's argument. Now this will be ruled on by a judge here and I think in the next two months within two months is the conclusion of that part so we'll see what happens to Gary Bowser. Personally, on a personal note I'm not sure what to think here he clearly knew what he was doing he clearly knew he shouldn't have been doing it he clearly knew it was illegal he hasn't argued at any point throughout all this process against any of the charges brought against him he's just been completely compliant completely admitting to everything except now when the US government wants him to serve five years in prison his lawyers are saying that's way too long at most it should be two, maybe three the probation should be shortened to as the lawyers are claiming so he hasn't fought back on anything until now but of course the chances of him ever paying back four and a half or 10 or $15 million in his lifetime was probably something on a lot of those massive fines and the government knows this are scary but keep getting deferred because of a lack of funds and ends up never actually getting paid off hence why they want the prison time so we'll see how that plays out I don't know, I'm kind of indifferent on this I mean the guy broke the law for seven years one could argue you broke the law for seven years you should be in jail for seven years so is it too strict? Is it not strict enough? I'll leave that to you guys to decide down in the comments this next story is a fun note we have a new best-selling game of all time in a major country so as of last week Animal Crossing New Horizons has now sold over 10 million physical copies in Japan that now makes it the number one best-selling game in Japanese history we now know for sure no matter what that it is the best-selling software ever the previous best-selling software in Japanese history was actually the Super Mario Brothers from the Nintendo Entertainment System or in their case the Famicon so I found that quite interesting obviously how long that record stood and yeah now it's owned by Animal Crossing New Horizons so I think that's just a really really neat thing to note our last story deals with Sonic Frontiers yes folks the big Sonic game is supposed to come this holiday celebrating that Sonic anniversary it's supposed to be the next generation leap the next leap forward for Sonic coming to all platforms and the Sonic team creative officer Takahashi Izuka was talking to a media outlet in an interview and had this to say about some gameplay details he said we pay extremely close attention to getting all the little Sonic details right to make sure that Sonic's signature speed and characteristics remain consistent across every gaming iteration with Sonic Frontiers we'll introduce new combat styles to bring Sonic's signature dexterity onto the battlefield and the new exploration options obviously play into his iconic speedy nature so I have no idea what these new gameplay styles are gonna be they have experimented with various things over the years so a lot of the stuff that we know from Sonic today has been around for a while however they haven't done a lot of fresh new ideas so let's just wait and see Sonic Frontiers obviously has this sort of rumbling of hype underneath it because it looks extremely promising everything we hear about it's extremely promising but we've been down this road before gotta be careful when it comes to Sonic there's a lot of pre-hype release and then failure to deliver so for now it's just more positive news for one of gaming's most iconic franchises anyways folks I am Defender Ruffle Jantz from Nintendo Prime I want to thank you for joining me on this journey through a classic Prime news episode so baby woo what a great way to end our week and I'll catch you in the next video stream whatever the hell I got going on